I got drunk once, but that was a long time ago, and it's gonna be my first and last.

Overall I don't drink due to health reasons. I'm glad I'm not the only one in this forum who doesn't drink. :P

:)

We need a "people who don't get drunk" topic now.

I went straightedge back in January. I used to love to drink (used to smoke and do drugs too, but quitting those was 3000 times easier than stopping drinking). I have my share of drunk stories and I did drunk-post in the final minutes of the Valentine's Day 2009 thread and lost the best romance novel avatar contest because of drunken stupidity. That entire thread was a beautiful trainwreck. Granted, it makes no sense now since we have "normal" avatars. http://www.rpgfan.com/boards/index.php?topic=5371.0

I've tasted alcohol before but I don't drink for personal and religious reasons. I make enough bad mistakes when I'm sober, at any rate. :P

Not drinking (or going "straightedge", like Neal) can be a bit of a social dilemma- liquor is a huge part of British culture, from what I've seen, so sometimes I'm the only one in the room with her head screwed on right. It's a wonder that they don't raise liquor taxes over here. Then again, cheap liquor keeps the general public satisfied/distracted.

Straightedge= don't drink, don't smoke, don't do drugs. Other people who claim 'edge go beyond those precepts to include not engaging in promiscuous sex, adopting a vegetarian or vegan diet, or not consuming caffeine or prescription drugs.

For me, I just do the don't drink, don't smoke, don't do drugs, and don't engage in promiscuous sex. I don't like to drink soda, but I'll bite the bullet if that's the only non-alcoholic offering. Soda still tastes absolutely nasty to me. I gotta have my afternoon cup of good coffee, though. And I'm not vegetarian.

My friends in the local punk scene are really supportive since many of us are vegetarian, vegan, edge, or whatever. What surprised me was that while all my peers think it's great that I'm 'edge, it was my cousins at a mini family reunion a few weeks ago who repeatedly kept pressuring me to have a beer with them, not quite "getting" that I take 'edge seriously. Like Nuri said, it gets hard sometimes when the center of any social scene is a bar or some sort of event involving drinking. I don't enjoy going out to bars any more, because I don't drink. It gets hard when "normal" people think you're strange because you don't drink. Of course, anyone who's a vegetarian probably gets it worse because meat is key to the diets of most world cultures.

I used to drink a fair bit. I LOVED beer and was into beer tasting (I loved ales, porters, and stouts.) I still have notes on some of the beers I've had. I tried going a month without drinking last August just to see how I felt (at the time I was limiting myself to 1 beer a week), but after that month I had massive beer cravings. Then back in late December last year or early January this year, I cracked a bottle of Dogfish Head (one of my personal favorite beers) and it tasted like poison to me. That's when I knew it was the right time for me to go 'edge. It's not an easy commitment, but I don't miss booze one bit. I also learned recently that alcoholism runs in my dad's side of the family so I dodged that bullet big time.

The wife and I share a bottle of wine on Saturday night. Two glasses of wine = tipsy, but far from drunk. I have never had any interest in taking it any further. Even when I was younger I never hung out with people who drank much. We had all sorts of fun without it.

I tried sobriety for 3 and a half years. It was ok but I like the taste of my beers and a good whisky or scotch once in a while. I get drunk maybe 3 or 4 times a year; most of the time I stay at a constant buzz. My tolerance for alcohol is pretty high. Takes a lot to get me loaded.